The biggest game in town

Clash between Rangers and Hearts today highlights just what the top flight is lacking

IF THE Championship is to upstage the Premiership in the season ahead, then it is wasting no time in delivering its best lines. The scheduling of Rangers against Hearts at Ibrox will ensure the largest attendance of the opening weekend and also an extended television audience. There will also be poignancy to the occasion, with Rangers renaming the Govan Stand in honour of Sandy Jardine, who lost his battle with cancer in April and was a classy figure for both clubs.

Yet it is a strange kind of glamour the Championship will trade in this season. Today’s protagonists find themselves there through financial mismanagement on an epic scale and are basically undertaking football’s equivalent of the rehabilitation of offenders. The Premiership sides who have existed far more modestly while money was pouring out of Ibrox and Tynecastle will find their initial hogging of centre stage a strange kind of punishment